Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Tuesday July 12, 2011 @03:19PM
from the since-when-did-hipsters-floss dept.

TheSilentNumber writes "I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the editors of Libre Graphics, a magazine made entirely using free software (even using version control so you can see every change ever made) after they gave a talk at this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. This project is living proof of the printing abilities of Free Software, 'That really is a constant refrain even within our own community. People always still talk about the printing problem. So what printing problem?' Libre Graphics Magazine is doing a truly outstanding job showcasing free works made with free tools, creating a publication of record, and reaching out to designers with this project."

Not really, everybody knows that you can create great products using the right commercial tool, but in order for OSS to get any sort of credibility it's going to take people going public with their support. Particularly when one is in a position to create a professional product using just OSS.

The more examples there are, the more likely it is that there's going to be funding to develop them further.

Not really, there's those of us that are too cheap to plunk down hundreds of dollars for commercial software as well. If you're a professional that's already gotten a career up and running it's probably not that big of a deal, but for those just starting to go pro, $500 or more can easily eat up several weeks worth of profits.

Hundreds of dollars? For software that home users might use, sure. For software that businesses use, a few hundred dollars is chump change, and accordingly most business software costs far more than just a few hundred dollars (esp. when you buy copies for all the PCs in a business that need it).

Business software is not cheap. Then add to that the fact that you usually have to run it on Windows, so you have to add in all the licensing costs for that, the costs for all the antivirus software for it, plus a

This is so stupid. Human beings have been making art for most of the last 100,000 years. Art adorning cave walls, painted by the light of torches in iron oxide ochres with chewed sticks, still have the power move and touch the deepest corners of our souls, and shine light into the humanity that created them. The tools are nothing. An artist can paint with a bloody finger. There is no magic in the tool. Some tools are better designed than others and the perfect tools allows the artist to express him/herself

When the tools cost thousands of dollars it becomes a large barrier to entry for beginners and small shops.
This group is trying to demonstrate that there is an alternative (other than piracy). Also, with increased adoption most open source software generally becomes far superior to commercial alternatives. Apache, Linux, nmap, there are tons of examples. Maybe with a few thousand more users and developers these publishing tools will become the benchmark.

When the tools cost thousands of dollars it becomes a large barrier to entry for beginners and small shops.

That is undeniably true (speaking as someone putting his own hard-earned cash into a new company right now). On the flip side, good tools typically pay for themselves in greater productivity and better quality of results very quickly. If you don't want to spend a few thousand on the right equipment and software, then it's possible that you're in a very awkward position, but IME it's far more likely that either you have the wrong idea about something or your business plan isn't really viable.

"Lots of formatting" is a relative scale, and although I mentioned docx, it applies just as well to things like spreadsheets as well, of course. In any case, even basic things like tables and numbered lists go wrong with irritating frequency if you're trying to get LibreOffice and MS Office to interoperate, and those are hardly drivers for switching to a DTP package. The bottom line is that if you write a document in LibreOffice, you can't save it in an MS

- Does MS Office handle ODF completely without any formatting glitch? Can you modify it so it does?

No, but it doesn't matter. Exactly one person I work with regularly sends me ODF files. He's a fellow contractor, not a paying client, and he asked up-front whether I could read the format because he knew a lot of people can't. (Of course, those using more recent versions of MS software actually can read ODF files anyway, probably at least as well as OpenOffice reads DOC(X) files.)

Meanwhile, my paying clients all expect DOC(X) documents, so that's what I have to send them, and I need software that is going

Huh? If you have a high quality end product the tools used are very relevent, as that is what made it possible. "Ooh, how'd you do that?" is a great thing to hear. If you have a low quality end product, the tools used are irrelevant. Nobody cares what went into a piece of shit.

But apart from the occasional full page (bitmap) graphics, most of the two issues is black text on white background, no graphical details, two uniform-width columns, left justified, no feathering [wikipedia.org] whatsoever, widows and orphans [wikipedia.org] everywhere, etc.

If this was meant as a proof of good typesetting, it fails. But whether this is FOSS' or editor's failure, that's hard to tell.

Have you looked at the magazine? It's targeted at quite a niche audience, and while it gets its message across and is a decent attempt, would not be considered a reference standard of graphic design. In the real world, graphic designers don't know Perl. Nor should they be expected to.

Adobe software is not particularly nice nowadays (feature bloat and bugs), and I'd love to see a truly viable competitor. The open source tools have improved as well. But there's a certain refinement professionals expect of the

But for me, and our club that I edit the magazine for, open source is brilliant, as it means that when I want to hand on the job, I can give the new editor everythin, the layout, editing tools, graphics manipulators, etc and it will all work with whatever OS they have. My wife edits the source material using open office and stores all edited documents as.dot. I use the GIMP mainly for co our correction, alpha transparency, and minor graphical edits, and the layout is done in scribus. We then output a high

I don't think that people are complaining that something is impossible to do. From my own FOSS experience, you usually have the tools for pretty much everything, and hardware issues are solved by cherry-picking compatible hardware. The problem is usually rather about how much effort does it take to solve something with FOSS tools only, compared to proprietary tools.

Now, I have no idea what the difference is in this particular area, since I never faced the challenge, and don't know what tools would be involv

"Article deserved an illustration and we couldn't find one." So they published the mag with a big blank "draw your own illustration" area, for the "work-flow" article -- Only later realizing that Creative Commons Exists, and they could have used CC media... here [youtube.com].

Keep up the good work. Everyone has to start somewhere!
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My first programs were trash, but they were useful to some (doom & X-Com map & save game editors); Some of the web comics I like looked like crap in their early panels, none of